Emotion vs. Thinking in War and Marriage
As the Presidential primary races heat up and the November elections approach, I find myself thinking more and more about the role of emotion vs thinking in decision-making. Our clients – and our politicians – often speak with the limbic brain in charge. Many essential decisions get made on raw emotion! Sadly, these decisions have […]
Ask Ellyn: 8 questions, 8 answers, 8 days!
You have probably had a couple who has stalled out. There is progress, then regression. This happens for many reasons: change requires time and developmental evolution; trauma gets triggered and re-triggered; partners don’t take home with them what they learned in therapy; and many more… So I’ve created a new series to help you when […]
Confrontation Options: Financial Irresponsibility
“Many of us believe that wrongs aren’t wrong if done by nice people like ourselves.” Author Unknown. At the risk of starting this blog sounding sexist, there are two common areas of regression I’ve seen in men and women over many years working with couples. Women often dig in and want to be taken care […]
Couples Therapy Benefits From Interpersonal Neurobiology
In my online training program, I often invite guest experts to teach an extra class for my members. Recently Dr. Dan Siegel joined us. He packed an enormous amount into the time we all spent together. Dr. Dan Siegel is never complacent. Instead, he is always pushing the field and taking really complex material and […]
Clinical Example: Transcript of a Hostile Angry Couple
In my last blog post, I gave a list of practical suggestions to support your work with hostile angry couples. To end my series on working with hostile angry couples, I offer you a transcript that demonstrates the last two principles that were on that list. These were my last two suggestions on that list: […]
Suggestions for Working with Hostile Angry Couples
We are now halfway through my blog series on Hostile Angry Couples. In the first blog I wrote about some challenges you face working with these couples. The second blog suggested goals for both you and the couple. At the end of the second blog post, I promised to summarize some solutions to these challenges.
Goals of Early Therapy with Hostile Angry Couples
Goal Setting is always helpful to drive progress in couples therapy, and with hostile angry couples the use of goal setting in early therapy is particularly important. Goals will help you focus the session even when partners arrive for their appointment reverberating from their last fight – or launch into a new one! You’ll be […]
First of Four-Part Series: Challenges of Hostile Angry Couples
I consult on so many cases where therapists are struggling to be effective leaders with hostile angry couples, I know it is a widespread problem. The more disorganized a couple is and the more hostility there is, the more difficult it’s going to be for you to structure sessions and arrive at effective goals for […]
A Fresh Perspective on The Couples Conference
One attraction of The Couples Conference is that in addition to presenting and learning, I am able to connect with colleagues and meet face-to-face for the first time with some of the members of my online training group. One of those therapists wrote an informative summary of the conference that’s also an inspiring message. I […]
Update on Couples Conference 2015
This year’s Couples Conference has come and gone. Happily, it turned out to be another dynamic meeting filled with therapists from many countries as well as those from the United States. This year I conducted a workshop on self-absorbed partners with Sue Diamond-Potts. Sue is my assistant in the online training program and she also […]
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